8

 It would be difficult to imagine a more poignant and hard-hitting account of the tragedy and
cruelty of war in either conventional cinema or animated formats, and certainly the
excruciatingly slow demise of the doomed brother and sister towards a pitiful end makes it a
heartrending tour de force. All this granted, it has been suggested nonetheless that, despite the
clear merits of the film as an animated feature and the deftly handled evolution of the plot,
there remains a residual unease that the series of historical events that led up to the
conflagration of war are out of reach and do not register at all. Some have even suggested that
it perpetuates a perception amongst the Japanese as ‘victims’ of the war rather than as a
populace who were fervently and fanatically devoted to the militarist cause.9

Despite any of the foregoing reservations that might be entertained, however, Grave of the
Fireflies, and more particularly its significance as an attempt to transpose the essence of
Nosaka Akiyuki's 1967 short story of the same name, stands out as a benchmark in Japan's
post-war treatment of the war experience, and of the capacity of animation to facilitate
precisely the complex overlapping of fictive and historiographical ‘refiguration’ as articulated
at the outset. In this connection, David Stahl's excellent exegesis of Grave of the Fireflies is
indeed a key resource for discussing the working out of wartime trauma.10 The merit of his
commentary is the deeply sympathetic account of Nosaka's eminently painful process of
dealing with ‘the return of the repressed’. In particular, it is ‘the mixture of dissembling,
confession and testimony’ that he so pertinently captures as being not the symptoms of a
person incapable of ‘handling the truth’, but in fact needing to work through an admixture of
fact and fiction to eventually emerge at a point of ‘reconciliation’.11

It is perhaps hard to find a better instance of a narrative text that exemplifies Ricoeur's
account of the uneasy relation of the fictive to the factual inherent in ‘historiographical
operations’. It has the added bonus of providing an example of how rejoining with the past
can also entail, indeed necessitate, a degree of passing over the details of memory to aim for
what is only possible through certain kinds of selective ‘forgetting’ – forgiveness. What
becomes amply evident in Stahl (and Hiroko Cockerill's excellent commentary) is that we
cannot demand ‘all the facts’ quite as we might like them. Nosaka's public accounting for his
wartime experience entailed, after initial recognition, some acknowledgement that not all the
detail of his own description of his experience at the end of the war was entirely full and
accurate. It cannot be doubted that the burden of the first-hand witness is no easy one –
Nosaka was clearly a tortured soul.

But since Grave of the Fireflies, there have been precious few attempts to engage with the
experience of World War Two directly through animation, or create animated material that
works on the premise of articulating a series of events relating to that historical experience.
With the exception of some recent productions that have commemorated the end of the
Second World War through the adaptation of personal testimonies, most of the material
produced, intriguingly enough, has been published in the form of manga (at least in the first
instance) only to be later issued in the form of animation.12For example Silent Service by
Kawaguchi Kaiji, was released as a manga in Big Comic Spirits from 1988 to 1996
(Kodansha), and later released as an OVA in 1997 and 1998 through Sunrise. Its distinctive
plot gambit was to conjure a hypothetical contemporary scenario where a Japanese
submarine, named rather eponymously the Yamato, strikes out as a rogue element
disregarding both the Japanese high command and US ‘allied’ interests by embarking on an
independent political and military agenda on the high seas. And of course it is impossible to
discuss the ‘revisionist’ tide of the 1990s without referring to the work of Kobayashi
Yoshinori who debuted as a deeply subversive and iconoclastic manga-writer through Big
Comic Spirits. His Gomanizumu Sengen (Gentosha, 1992–1995) was unusual in that it took
on a number of ‘taboo’ topics, from the position of buraku in Japan to daring to question an
uncritical view of the Imperial family, but his output took a decisively radical turn with
content that was unmistakably aimed at redressing the so-called ‘masochistic’ account of
Japanese modern history. This included his controversial apologia for the Japanese Imperial
Army's activities in Nanking, as articulated in his now rather infamous Sensoron (Gentosha,
1998, 2001, 2003).13

So overall it is hard not to conclude that since Grave of the Fireflies there have been
relatively few serious engagements with Japanese military history either in manga or anime,
apart from a disparate selection of productions that employ the events of that time as a
‘setting’ or to obtain motifs of the era that are then transposed into a fantasy world to
facilitate a romantic adventure. As was established rather emphatically with regard to Grave
of the Fireflies, the highly personal experience that played such a deep role in the formation
of the creative collaboration, is largely missing from more recent productions, and it is
perhaps now not possible to expect such forms of high impact ‘testimony’ from those who
have concrete historical concerns or do not have the necessary reservoir of experience to
drive the creative process.

(From Alistair Swale’s Memory and forgetting: examining the treatment of traumatic historical memory in Grave of the
Fireflies and The Wind Rises)